Aggiungi una trama nella tua linguaDramatisation of the love affair between Sidney James and Barbara Windsor, played out against the backdrop of the 'Carry On' films during the 1960s and 1970s.Dramatisation of the love affair between Sidney James and Barbara Windsor, played out against the backdrop of the 'Carry On' films during the 1960s and 1970s.Dramatisation of the love affair between Sidney James and Barbara Windsor, played out against the backdrop of the 'Carry On' films during the 1960s and 1970s.
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- QuizAt one point Kenneth Williams asks "Oh, what's the bloody point?" of his fellow actors. That was the last line Williams wrote in his diary before he died from an overdose of barbiturates.
- BlooperIn the excerpt from Carry on Henry (1971), Bernard Bresslaw appears as Cardinal Wolsey, a part played in the film by Terry Scott.
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Barbara Windsor: I think heaven's being left alone with a Steinbeck in the edit suite. You sit in front of your life and you're allowed to re-edit it. Cut the rotten bits, loop the sex, montage the good moments. Live it over and over, a bit better every time. And eventually, make it perfect.
- ConnessioniReferences Carry on Nurse (1959)
This half is filmed like a CARRY ON, with the central romance between Sid and Babs diffused by innuendo-laden bits of business featuring Kenneth Williams, Charles Hawtrey et al. There is one stunning shot at the beginning where the vast Roman ampitheatre through which a soldier walks is revealed to be a tiny model, pointing to the themes of reality and appearance that will be the film's theme, as well as the economic reality of these films' production.
Sid's life in this half is played like a CARRY ON farce, full of repetition, coitus interruptus, double entendres, comedy gangsters and buxom ladies locked in bathrooms. The general verdict on CARRY ONs is that they are an assembly line churning out shoddy products of ever decreasing quality, concerned only with adolescent titillation (this is not my view - HENRY and CLEO at least are great films, while KHYBER is the greatest of all British satires, and the equal of Bunuel); so treating the lives of these people who must subsume their own personalities in their screen personae (even the sex scene is mediated through cinematic apparatus), locked in an evermore limiting labyrinth of personal need and public status is true at least to public perception (behind which, presumably, the filmmakers wish to delve).
The lines and jokes are fruity and excellent, the sets deliciously gaudy, the re-enactments priceless, the chronology a little wobbly, the acting a triumph (Samantha Spiro as Babs is so winning and moving she makes me totally reevaluate a figure I'd previously considered fairly margainal), but, best of all, it shows that farce, and especially CARRY ONs, have an emotional basis denied by its detractors.
The screenwriter doesn't quite believe it either though, and this fertile approach is soon abandoned as the film gets more serious, tragic, and it seeks an appropriate mode to express this, fixing on a fatal melange of social realism and middle-class Rattiganisms (so as not to alienate the film's prime-time audience). The subversion of genre that was the first half (and subverting genre and its conservative functions was what CARRY ONs were all about) becomes a conventional biopic, robbing the subjects of their breezy singularity.
Yes it's all very sad and desparing and tragic, yes the recreation of a shabby 70s Britain at the fag-end of both the entertainment industry and British society itself is expertly realised, but so is Merchant Ivory. There are lines of dialogue, which, without irony, could have come straight from an Alan Bennett parody. The despair of Williams is frequently alluded to, but to anyone unfamiliar with his story somewhat obscured.
The hilarious parody of Burton and Taylor that characterises Sid and Babs' early relationship becomes sadly literal as we go on. You certainly wouldn't know why these cheaply-made music hall quickies remain astonishingly popular and vibrant today, while their more respectable peers lie in cobwebbed vaults. After such a fun start, then, a bit of a shame.
- alice liddell
- 25 apr 2000
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